Archives for: March 2014

Pi is a Greek letter used as a mathematical symbol in circle geometry. Since the first three digits of Pi are 3.14, this makes March 14th (3-14) “Pi day.” Since pie is round, and sounds like the Greek letter Pi, we celebrate Pi Day by eating pie.

We started this a few years ago when I was homeschooling, and we spent the whole day doing math with circles and baking. This year, Pi Day fell on a Friday, which means I’m usually busy preparing for the Shabbos meal. This year was exceptionally busy, as I spent the morning at the doctor’s office with an injured child rather than at home puttering around the kitchen.

Still, I managed to bake a couple of pies to accompany Friday night’s dinner. First I made a broccoli pie instead of the roasted green beans we usually have as our green veggie for the meal. For the past few months, I’d saved the “broccoli crumbs” in the bottom of a Costco-sized bag of frozen broccoli. I combined the crumbs from 3 or 4 bags of broccoli and warmed them in a baking dish. Meanwhile, I chopped an onion very fine and sautéed it in oil and salt. When both were cooked, I let them both cool a bit, then combined them, added a few eggs, some more salt, a dash of cayenne pepper, and a little bit of onion powder, since I hadn't used quite enough fresh onion. I sprayed a pie plate with cooking spray and poured the filling in to bake.

Meanwhile, Hannah made the pumpkin pie. Jack had walked to the closest grocery store and picked up a can of pumpkin and a 4-pack of Rice Dream drink boxes. Had I planned ahead, I would have made homemade rice milk and I would have bought the canned pumpkin ahead of time. The recipe on the can called for a 12 ounce can of evaporated milk, but we substituted 8 ounces of rice milk. I've been doing that for years. The rice milk is thinner than the evaporated milk, so we use less, and the overall texture is about the same. Normally, I’d use honey or agave in the pumpkin pie, but Hannah was doing the baking and she used granulated sugar- though we did use about 2/3 of what the recipe called for. Most recipes are WAY too sweet for our tastes. Just like the broccoli pie, we skipped the crust and sprayed cooking spray on the pie plate before filling.

When each pie was mostly done, I took it out for a moment and drew a “pi” symbol into the top with a clean chopstick. Then the symbol was firmly embedded when it was fully cooked.

I’d originally planned to make some kind of dessert pie with some slightly over-ripe apples and/or pears from my fridge, but I ran out of time and energy.